MOON 2?

On 17July2019 this blog site selected Apollo 11 as the greatest achievement of humanity.  How we technologically and economically orchestrated Man on the Moon in the '60's had little to do with humanity's curiosity or for the pursuit of knowledge, and was driven by politics and the Cold War.

President Dwight Eisenhower reacted to the shock of Sputnik by selecting our U.S. Navy to proceed with their Vanguard rocket to catch up with the Soviet Union, to also launch satellites into orbit.  Most only remember those attempts that blew up on the pad.  From 1957 to 1959 the Navy actually succeeded with three functional satellites in space.  Ike ignored the Army program led by Werner von Braun, mostly because he had troublesome Nazi links.  Eisenhower was chary about the military running the space program, so he essentially created NASA.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republic fired off the first intercontinental ballistic missile on 21August 1957, then Sputnik (left) a few months later, waking up the USA.  The USSR further sent two missions to the Moon in 1959, the first photographing the far side.

We all recall Neil Armstrong taking his first step.  However, the first man-made landing (a euphemism for crashing) was Luna 2 (right), this sphere with antenna, east of Mare Serenitatis.


Few know that both the Soviet Union and the USA were sending up and down rockets with animals since 1947.  Fruit flies that year were recovered, with Able, a rhesus monkey, and Baker, a squirrel monkey, returned alive on a Jupiter rocket in 1959.  Otherwise most animals sent out never made it back alive.

 In 1960, the Soviets solidified their leadership, when Laika, a mixed breed dog, was the first to orbit our planet.  Again being copycats, the following year USA sent Ham (a chimpanzee) into orbit.





But when Yuri Gargarin became the first human to circle the globe and their Venera 1 had a Venus flyby, it was clear we were losing the space and international prestige races.  President John F. Kennedy, never previously enamored with space, felt compelled to venture forth with something particularly monumental to regain world respect.  This was a period when the Cold War was at peak, the Bay of Pigs invasion had failed in 1961, the Vietnam War was escalating and Civil Rights protests began to get serious.  And you think the country is today a mess with Donald Trump, mass shootings (keep in mind that guns kill around 100 people/day in the USA anyway), China tariffs and Russian interference in our voting process?

On 25May1961 President Kennedy announced to a special joint session of Congress a national goal to safely send an American to the Moon and back by 1969.  It is generally not appreciated that up to 60% of Americans in the 1960's were opposed to spending money for something so useless as the Moon.  Civil Rights activists were particularly vocal about this expenditure.  Most scientists and even the research staff of NASA were opposed, for this effort would take money away from their projects.  The military industrial complex, too, worried about how the Moon would impact their defense programs.  They all called this the moon-doggle.

Supporting Kennedy was the head of NASA, James Webb (honored with his name on the $10 billion Space Telescope--which had an original cost of $1 billion for launch in 2007, now, perhaps in 2021), who was the prime networker, placing NASA work centers in southern states, satisfying controlling Congressional committee chairmen.  Aerospace companies were fed major funding to be part of the effort, getting that bit of opposition off their backs.

During this period when the Cuban missile crisis was over, a hot line was established between DC and Moscow and a treaty to ban the open air testing of nuclear testing was signed, some posturing occurred between the USA and USSR on the Moon issue.  Kennedy proposed to Khrushchev a joint mission.  First, Khrushchev felt they were still ahead, and, too, he was still embarrassed by that Cuban pull-out, so he ignored the entreaty.  It is said that, while Kennedy was getting worried about the budget size, he pretty much knew the Soviets would say no, and wanted to push forward because they were still the prime enemy, and this offer would satisfy national critics.

This matter of cooperation was again discussed just before Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, and Khrushchev was almost willing to concede, when he was booted out of power.  That year the USSR, though, did send up the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova at the age of 26 into space, spending three days in orbit, and remaining as the only woman to solo a space mission.  She retired in 1997 as a major general, and now sits on the State Duma.

This reminds me of my period in the U.S. Senate when Senator Spark Matsunaga in the early 80's published The Mars Project:  Journeys Beyond the Cold War.  He had already sponsored congressional resolutions suggesting cooperation between the U.S. and the USSR in space, and wanted 1992 to be called International Space Year, celebrating the 500th anniversary of Columbus and 75th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, for a combined American-Russian manned mission to Mars.

For the record, the Apollo Project was a lot more expensive than the Manhattan Project, but they were one shot deals, and not particularly significant relative to something like our energy technology efforts, which go on forever, which are peanuts compared to our annual defense budget, which is more than half of all discretionary spending:

Was Apollo worth it?  Absolutely, for this accomplishment broke the will of the Soviets, who then tried to catch up by spending too much on space, bankrupting the government, leading, ultimately, to the end of the Cold War.

Just recently, a return to the Moon is perking up again, and there are two main reasons.  American billionaires seeking a legacy in space, plus China.  The Federal government, through NASA, and the eager rich, led by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, have established footholds at the Kennedy Space Center.

Quoting the latest TIME:

The China National Space Administration (CNSA) caught the world napping. The People’s Republic didn’t launch its first satellite until 1970 and for decades was a space backwater. But in 2003, that started changing when China launched its first taikonaut—the Chinese equivalent of the American astronaut and the Russian cosmonaut. 
China has now flown multiple crewed missions, conducted spacewalks, and built and launched a mini space station. The country has also flown four robotic lunar missions, most spectacularly earlier this year, with the landing of the Chang’e-4 base station and rover on the far side of the moon.

To me, all those Moon missions to develop resources like rare earths and scientific outposts, then on to Mars for what I can't imagine, make no realistic sense today.  I'm beginning to sound like those Luddites, but there are more important spending priorities today.  Yet, there seems to be a pervading Star Trek mentality affecting those super-rich, romanticizing about an unknown that is dangerous and expensive for no profit.  Some day we will need to step into outer space.  That could be a millennium from now.  We still have several billion years left for Humanity on Planet Earth.

So what next in outer space?  Forget any Mars half a trillion dollar mission.  Dabbling on the Moon could cost $100 billion for no certain economic potential.  Go ahead and spend a few billion dollars on SETI efforts like the Square Kilometer Array.  At this time the USA and China are not involved, but the draw of an Encyclopedia Galactica streaming in from an advanced civilization a billion years more mature than ours is intriguing enough to justify ten cents per person for the next decade.

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Tropical Depression Flossie is easing past the Hawaiian Islands just to our north, but the weather today looks fabulous, so after I send this posting out, I'm going golfing:

Francisco seems to be strengthening into a typhoon and will strike Kyushu momentarily:

Out of nowhere we now have Lekima, to become a Category 2 typhoon and whiz by both Okinawa and northern Taiwan beginning Thursday:

Conditions are prime enough on the projected path that even further strengthening could occur.  There is a good chance that instead of crashing into China, Lekima could instead turn towards Japan and South Korea.

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